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One of the strong recurring themes of sola is the sky. We are frequently treated to images of the sky, one character is constantly photographing the sky and sometimes characters discuss the sky. Much of sola is about the sky, so here is a place for those things.

This is a place to discuss the sky's beauty, it's moods, it's power over our hearts and souls. Or just a place to ask about the different types of cloud formations. Now, lets start the discussion with the off-topic post by Kaoru Chujo that inspired me to create this thread...

I figure this post is at least tangentially on-topic. This photo of the sky...

...was taken by Hirano Aya and posted to her blog yesterday. She wrote that the clouds breaking looked to her like a dragon leaping up and splitting open the sky. That's what it looks like to me, too. Click to enlarge.

I figure this post is at least tangentially on-topic. This photo of the sky...

...was taken by Hirano Aya and posted to her blog yesterday. She wrote that the clouds breaking looked to her like a dragon leaping up and splitting open the sky. That's what it looks like to me, too. Click to enlarge.

Not as beautiful as those shots posted by Areguzanda, but here are pics from three other current anime in which the sky is important:

(l-r): 1. Darker than Black, where the sky has been replaced by aliens with an artifical sky in which each star is connected with one of their "contractors" on Earth. 2. Hitohira, where a boy tells a girl: "You can see the Milky Way much more clearly here in the country, maybe that's why you came here." 3. Gurren-Laggen, where the protagonists are hungry and look up at the clouds (this cap is from the notorious episode 4).

It was the sky theme which attracted me to this series, as I too spend a lot of time photographing the sky. I agree totally with Yorito about it's ever-changing qualities: quite often I've seen a sky I want to photograph but by the time I've got my camera out and fitted the right lens to capture the particular composition the clouds have changed shape or the special quality of the light has gone. So I can sympathise with him rushing out to photograph it like he does.

OTOH since ep.1 I don't think they've done anything special with the sky, AIR was very much more beautiful in that respect, I often felt that the whole mood of AIR was determined by the ever-changing beautiful skies, which reach a climax in the final episode. (In fact when you check the Japanese name for the episode entitled "air", it is "sora", so really the two series AIR and Sola have the same name, but one translates it idiosyncratically, the other romanises it idiosyncratically.)

Another series which features a character who likes photographing the sky is Windy Tales, though in that case the sky photos look like collages of torn up white paper on blue backgrounds, very abstract and not at all evocative of the sentiments being expressed about it. (However I have to say the visual style of Windy Tales was one of the most original I've ever seen in an anime series.)

it finally cleared up enough for me to take som pictures.
though I think the clouds are coming back anytime now.

as you can see here:

though its blowing quite a bit up there so maybe the clouds will go away...
at least these clouds are on the move :

I was looking for a little special cloud to take a picture of...and when I turned my head straight up one little cloud was floating all alone with huge space of blue area in all directions.
looked kind of peaceful:

Explained at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020926.html with a larger version available if you click the image. The APOD Archive has thousands of beautiful pictures of space, the sky and related stuff. Though this one is definitely my favourite sky shot. I think of it whenever people bring up clouds, because this rocket trail is just so gorgeous, it's hard to believe it's real. ^^

Astronomy of the Day is an excellent site, I have checked it nearly everyday for years.

I've liked seeing the different "moods" of the sky (as I call it) long before I even saw any of these sky-related anime, although seeing them did cause me to take more pictures of it.

Probably my own favorite taken photo with the sky. I have a thing with powerlines too perhaps caused by some animes showing the lines silhouetted against the sky.

For photos not by me it would have to be this. Got it from years ago from a friend who had it as one of his favorite photos too.

Towering cumulonimbus clouds often seen in summer scenes in animes such as AIR, are used because they do in fact usually appear mostly in summer, when the temperatures on the ground are hot enough to caused updrafts to form them, and they are indeed towering. They can get over twice as tall as the tallest mountain, Everest.

it's too clouded to take any good shoots today.
but I have a special treat for all of you.
this is the link to a online-webcam thats up 24/7
just use F5 to refresh the site (the first time you press the link it may lag..so press F5 at least a couple of times before it is really updated)
and you'll get minute updated pics from above the City of Molde, north/west in norway.

I've taken a lot of pictures of the sky with my camera as well, but I don't have many of them on this computer. I was so happy to get a 5.0MP camera like 2 years ago, and now I'm reading about 12MP doh Such is technology though